At 4:30am I awoke without the help of the alarm clock. My body has become conditioned to waking up with enough time to get to a good position to capture a sunrise photo. It’s a sickness, I suppose. Only on this morning, I’m nowhere near a trail in the middle of and industrial part of Los Angeles, in a hotel room with a sleeping child and wife and a fear of waking either of them up.

As quietly as possible, I got dressed, grabbed my camera and headed out to find anything of interest to photograph. This will never go down as one of my better photos. I realized as I was driving around at 5am that there is nothing in this are that qualifies as a “vista point.” So I parked my car in a warehouse parking lot and walked to the 5 Freeway overpass overlooking the old Santa Fe Springs Drive-in Theater and current Santa Fe Spring Swap Meet location. Honestly, this was the best I could do.

I thought perhaps the sun rising over the distant San Bernardino Mountains might make for a good backdrop to this Santa Fe Springs icon, (when it opened it was the largest drive-in in America), but realized as I was taking this picture that I had not changed out my battery from yesterday’s track meet, the reason for our being in this spot. The battery light was flashing and any hopes of getting the mountains silhouetted in the background was not going to happen. So I’m left with this, and a couple of graffiti photos that may never see the light of day.

As I always say, some mornings are better than others. It’s now 8:03am and the family is still asleep, for the record.

Jeff Turner

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